A research report submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements of the degree Master of Arts in Anthropology March 2016 / This research report explores how private security is materially assembled in suburban Johannesburg. Based on ethnographic fieldwork within a private security company operating across the northern suburbs of Greater Johannesburg, it examines how the materiality of security is intimately intertwined with shaping the socio-spatial terrain of the city. Using a new materialist “assemblage” theory proposed by Jane Bennett, it contends although the materials of private security are designed to protect and exclude, they often work rather differently on the ground, resulting in strange new ways of seeing, moving, and relating in the city.

Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2008. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Yes

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print.

Thesis (M.M.A.S.)--U.S. Command and General Staff College. / Title from title screen (viewed Apr. 9, 2008).

Private military and security companies (PMSCs) have been extensively used to provide military and security services in various armed conflicts. Aspects of their use have generated concerns that the personnel of these companies are no more than modern mercenaries. This thesis clarifies the legal regime applicable to such companies in armed conflicts. This regime includes both the legal status and legal regulation of PMSC personnel. The aim of this thesis is not to create a new status for PMSC personnel, but to clarify which of the existing legal statuses adopted by international humanitarian law (IHL) can apply to them. This status relies completely on the actors to whom these companies supply their services, and the sort of mission in which they are involved. This approach is not employed in the literature. Most attention has been paid to the use of PMSCs by States. This is not, however, the only scenario whereby PMSCs become engaged in armed conflicts. PMSCs provide their services to other actors such as the United Nations (UN), Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and armed groups. Consequently, one definitive status cannot be applied in all situations. Different types of status can be applied in accordance with the nature of the particular PMSC involvement in armed conflicts. Accordingly, the three statuses established by IHL can apply to PMSC personnel; namely those of “mercenary”, “combatant” and “civilian”. Two environments classify the personnel of PMSCs as mercenaries; this is when they provide their services to a State party to an international armed conflict and to an armed group in non-international armed conflicts. Mercenary status is not applicable to the use of PMSCs in UN peacekeeping operations or providing protection to NGOs, because in both circumstances neither can be considered as a party to an armed conflict. PMSC personnel can be categorised as “combatants” when hired to provide their services to States and when they are used as UN peacekeepers. They are most likely to be classified as “civilians” if they are not “combatants”. There are two types of civilians; “civilians accompanying armed forces of a party to an armed conflict”, and “normal civilians”. The former categorisation only applies in international armed conflict, while the latter can apply to all other PMSC involvement in armed conflicts. Appropriate regulation of PMSCs depends on the legal status of their personnel. Therefore, this thesis asserts that IHL can regulate the activities of PMSCs. Additionally, international human rights law can apply to PMSCs and their personnel.

Distributed systems are shared by a large number of users that generate task-based workloads. The sharing of hardware and software by multiple workloads mandates the need for security mechanisms that protect the artifacts of individual tasks. Additionally, these systems must meet user-based performance expectations, a factor that must be addressed during the security service selection process. Current performance-based security service selection methodologies use flat GSPN models that suffer from exponential evaluation complexity as the model size increases. Due to this limitation, these methodologies cannot evaluate models representing the scale of current distributed systems. To address the evaluation complexity problem the hierarchical methodology presented in this report was designed to avoid the system size limitations of the current flat GSPN model-based methodologies. The methodology relies only on general performance models capable of modeling platform-independent systems designs. The refactoring methodology uses a divide-and-conquer approach to evaluate the entire system model. Using model-refactoring techniques the input model is modified into a hierarchy of subsystem models using abstraction to isolate performance measurement to component level. This technique further increases the effectiveness of the performance evaluation by avoiding the duplicate evaluation of identical components. Therefore increasing the number of alternate security service components results in a linear complexity growth of the entire system model. Thus, the limiting factor of the hierarchical methodology is the size of the largest component rather than the previous system size limitation. The experimental results show that the hierarchical model-based methodology is able to scale beyond system model sizes that can be evaluated using current flat GSPN-based performance evaluation methodologies. This scalability improvement implies that the hierarchical technique can evaluate models containing up to 50 individual components using the current GSPN tools. Thus the contribution of this hierarchical technique will continue to improve with subsequent advancements in GSPN model evaluation techniques.

Thesis (PhD(Public Affairs))--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A. in Security Studies (Homeland Security and Defense))--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2004. / Thesis advisor(s): Maria Rasmussen. Includes bibliographical references (p. 57-59). Also available online.